April Favorites: Orpheus, Alice, and Temeraire

Don't even bother trying to smash any records with your reading goals, y'all, because Will has already read 118 books this year.

Thirty of them in April!

She's sad, silly girl, because this isn't as many books as she read in March; we've been outside more, and she's been studying a LOT more for her AP European History exam in two days.

Will finished the His Dark Materials series last month, and now counts the entire series as among her favorite books from the year:



She read Moby Dick, and amused me to no end by how much she genuinely loved it. I would NEVER tell her that I think a book is boring before she's had a chance to read it for herself, and so I do think that as she read me tidbits of the book, laughing over inaccurate information about whales and despairing over the captain getting crazier and crazier, she really did so in ignorance that much of the literate world considers the book to be a mournful slog through overbearingly obtuse prose.



Another of Will's favorites is another old friend, and she and I both adore the His Majesty's Dragons series. Will is the one who first got me into the series--of COURSE!--but this book is new to both of us, as the library didn't have it until I asked them to buy it. And they did!

It's not on my list for this month because Will took it from me and read it instead. I actually looked for it this morning so I could start it but couldn't find it anywhere so I started The Andromeda Strain instead. It's around somewhere, probably under the couch or on the stack of books on the kitchen table or, ooh! Maybe in the backpack that I took to last Friday's Girl Scout meeting!



Here are Will's other favorites from the month:



And here's the rest of what Will read in April!



I didn't read much in April, and what I did read I didn't like much of. This little graphic novel that I zoomed through on a Saturday afternoon was actually my favorite of the bunch:



It has all my favorite things: camping, badge-earning, and bookish loners who don't know how to socialize.

I also read a disappointing novel about the workers of the Manhattan Project's Secret City; a parenting book that has mostly succeeded in pissing the kids off because now most afternoons I kick them out for an hour of "unstructured, active outdoor time;" the Alice in Wonderland books; and a biography of Lewis Carroll that tried sooooo hard to convince me that he wasn't a pedophile.

I'm still pretty sure he was a pedophile.



Just like books, YouTube is a great place to delve into our random obsessions. In the car a few weeks ago, I heard an NPR interview with the composer of Hadestown; I barely managed to make it to the gym and then back home before I was on YouTube looking for clips. It's a post-Apocalyptic/Depression-era retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice--are you surprised that I'm obsessed?

Here's Persephone:



Ooh, and here's Persephone with Hermes and then Hades, and a little bit of Eurydice at the end:



Here's an older recording of the soundtrack, which I'm also obsessed with. The new recording of the Broadway version is going to be out next month--mark your calendars!

Syd really likes to watch ballet videos, so we watch a lot of those when we hang out together in the evenings:



And then often the suggestions after those videos lead us down some very strange rabbit holes. Did you know about Japanese precision walking?!?



And then this apparently iconic cheerleading competition performance that shows that cheerleaders are REALLY good with rhythm--



--which led us to wonder what cheerleading competitions used to be like. A lot tamer, it turns out, but that's surely too high to stack people:



Will discovered these Architectural Digest videos, and now that's what WE watch when we hang out together:





Rich people homes are ridiculous.

Did YOU read or watch anything ridiculous in April?

Our Mini Bookshelf from The PVC Pipe Book

Check out this quick and easy project that I made on one of the first shirtsleeves weather days this spring:



It's the Mini Bookshelf from The PVC Pipe Book (which I received for free from a publicist), and it came together in the time that I should have been spending cooking a decent, nourishing dinner for my family:

I'm pretty sure that we had sandwiches for dinner that night, but whatever. I built a little bookshelf from scratch, AND I painted it!

It's meant to be the latest foray in my neverending quest to organize the big table that we use as the kids' school table during the school week (and which they're SUPPOSED to clean up so that we can use it for family stuff each weekend but they never do and I'm perennially too lazy to add it to my list of things to nag them about), but I think I might like it even better in its current set-up:

We're deep into a stretch of shirtsleeves weather days--yay!--that make school outside the perfect thing to get the kids a little more enthused about book work until that stops working and I have to think of something else. We are also on high alert, as yesterday, our whole family was sitting on the couch admiring the children's Easter baskets when we heard a chicken start fussing outside. I ran to the open deck door (because shirtsleeves weather!), saw something orange tumbling with one of our Brahma hens, took another step forward and saw that it was a genuine, BBC documentary real-live FOX trying manfully to snap my sweet baby's neck while she squawked and struggled and tossed feathers everywhere.

I, too, began hollering, ran out across the deck, slipped and almost broke my dang neck, bent down to grab the little kid's Crocs (that she was supposed to have brought in last night, sigh...) so that I could start throwing stuff--my second choice was going to be my cell phone--but by the time I stood back up and readied my throwing arm the fox had completely disappeared and Brahma Hen #3 was booking it back to the flock where she was supposed to be in the first place. The big kid, who was part of the also-hollering idiot mob who ran out behind me with no idea of what was going on but clearly ready to do some brawling, claims that she saw a streak of orange disappear back into our woods.

Brahma Hen #3 is fine, thank goodness. She's so big and fluffy that it looks like the fox didn't even break the skin, although the amount of feathers she had flying at the time had me sure that the fox was something like four chickens deep by the time I ran out there. I'd say that I hoped the whole flock learned a lesson from her experience, but I'm sitting by an open door right this second and can clearly see our little blonde and brown hen, much less fluffy and definitely much smaller, just bopping around all by herself miles from the flock but painfully near lots of great hiding places for foxes. I swear, they cause me as much worry as the kids do sometimes!

So that's how we spent the less fun part of our Easter Sunday strengthening the chicken coop, researching foxes (Mr. Craft Knife looked up from the computer at one point and said, "This website claims that the fox has probably been watching us for days and knows our routine!" so now we've got not just regular life but a high-key stalker to think about), and trotting Luna out to "keep watch" and "guard the chickens" for us. I have no idea if she's actually capable of these tasks, since the last time a chicken died on our property SHE was the reason I had to euthanize it, but still. She's bigger than a fox, at least.

And now we can spend our school days outside, not just enjoying the lovely weather and getting some fresh air, but keeping a weather eye on the goings-on of the backyard and the fool hens who are SUPPOSED to be staying with that rooster who I tolerate even though I have to take a stick every time I walk around my own property, and turn around suddenly every few feet as I walk to catch him acting like he wasn't just about to jump me from behind BECAUSE HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING MY SWEET BABIES FROM FOXES.

How is YOUR week going?

P.S. If you've got the PVC to make this mini bookshelf, you should also have your kids make this PVC pipe bow and arrow set and PVC pipe sword. It'll help them in their battles against the foxes, don't you know?

P.P.S. Want to see what other mischief I (and the cats) manage to get up to? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page for updates!

Homeschool Science: The Chicken Egg Osmosis Experiment

When Syd and I played with gummy bear osmosis, I wanted her to observe water passing into the gummy bear and causing it to expand.

It did. It was cool!

With this chicken egg osmosis experiment, I wanted the kids to understand that osmosis can go both ways through a semi-permeable membrane. If the more concentrated solution is inside the cell, water goes there. But if the more concentrated solution is outside the cell, then that's where the water goes.

Bring on the naked egg!

You can dissolve the shell from an egg as a simple, hands-on demonstration with little ones, as an early elementary human biology lesson (and demonstration of why we brush our teeth!), and as one of the projects in an acids/bases unit of a chemistry study--we've done all of these, so it's old news but still always fun.

And if you have sensory-seeking kids, there's nothing like the feel of a chicken egg with its shell dissolved away:

And speaking of sensory-seeking kids...



I promise that, current evidence to the contrary, she is very intelligent. Just don't try this at home, okay?

Sigh...

So as you've gathered, before we violated every lab safety standard and Licked the Science, we soaked the eggs in vinegar for long enough to get them nice and bloated, as osmosis equalized the water inside the egg with the water outside it. The kids' challenge was to find a solution to soak the eggs in that would cause water to migrate FROM the egg TO that solution, thus shrinking the egg and lowering its mass.

The kids weighed their eggs in grams, labeled jars and put the eggs in--

Guess whose jar belongs to Syd?

--and then went in search of a solution with the proper characteristics. Will chose canola oil (spoiler alert: it worked); although I encouraged Syd to use her notes from the gummy bear osmosis experiment to inform her choice, her first idea was baking soda dissolved into water and dyed blue. This had the opposite of the desired effect, as you can see from the fact that her egg is now blue:

It looks really cool, though! It would perhaps be a fun continuation of this project, when done with small children, to dye the water a rainbow of colors.

I stopped photographing the eggs at this point because they were soooo gross (and Will did NOT lick one again), but you'll be pleased to learn that for Syd's second try, she chose dish soap. Success!

If you've got even more time to play, you can do this similar but more academically rigorous osmosis experiment with potatoes, instead. You can also watch this neat little animated model of a cell membrane in action.

Trashion/Refashion Show 2019: Gibbon Girl

It's fun to see how Syd has grown in the nine years that she's participated in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show:

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes (with WILL!!!)

2016: The Phoenix (which I sewed while sick with the flu)

2017: Supergirl of the Night (the last design that I helped Syd sew)

2018: Medieval Maiden (the first garment that Syd constructed completely independently)

And that brings us to 2019: The Year of the Gibbon!

These are Syd's application pictures, and every year they suck, because February is rarely well-lit. Oh, well. You can still see that Syd's vision is a caped black tunic and leggings (upcycled from a few black tops and sweaters that we thrifted). The highlight of the garment is a pair of sleeves that Syd can make look ruched, but can also make look like this:

She used a pair of pants for those sleeves, and later altered it so that she could have a secret pass-through for her hands when they're in their super-long formation.

Syd really, really liked the idea of sleeves that drape like a bridal train, but she also intended from the beginning that they could be fully weaponized, like so:

I love seeing her have so much fun with her design. From the very beginning, Syd's garments have always been playful, and most of them embrace big, powerful movement.

Her garments are never something that you simply wear; they're something that you DO:

 Our town's Trashion/Refashion Show is happily well-situated within our busy spring every year--it's generally about a month after cookie season, and about a month before Syd's birthday party. It's nice, because as soon as we finish planning for one thing, we can move right into the next!

The day of the fashion show is the hair/makeup call, then the stage rehearsal, then cooling our heels in the house while the other acts rehearse--

--then the pizza party--

--then the fun time of squeezing into a few square inches in the overcrowded dressing rooms backstage--

--and then I go sit in the audience with the rest of the extended family, and Syd?

She shines.

Here are some cheater pics that I took during the dress rehearsal:

And here's the real show:



This year's official show photographer has been taking photos for four years now, and he also created the slideshow that played between the acts. Check out this awesome tribute that he made for all of the Trashion Kids--he made a whole slide for each kid that he'd seen come back every year, and here's Syd's!

Look at how she's grown. Syd actually HATES it when people tell her how much she's grown (it's Nutcracker-related trauma on account of they cast by height and they're always looking for the shortest kids and it sucks), but look at the kid in those photos. She has grown! Syd has always been an artist, but she's become such an able DIYer, too, confidently constructing her vision garment from top to bottom, shoes to hairstyle. Those leggings? She sewed them from a stretchy black sweater, sure, but she also did it WITHOUT A PATTERN. No template. She didn't even trace another pair of leggings! She just... started cutting, sewed them up, and boom. Perfect leggings.

Perfect leggings. Smoky eye shadow that she applied herself. A garment with sleeves fit for royalty and suitable as long-range weapons.

I absolutely can't wait to see what this kids does next.

Homeschool Science: The Gummy Bear Osmosis Experiment

Osmosis is such an important concept to understand when you're learning cell biology (see also: diffusion and active and passive transport!). Nothing about cells is going to make sense if you don't completely understand the ways that cells can communicate and exchange, you know?

The other day, looking for something--ANYTHING!!!--to engage the younger kid, who has been on more-or-less a homeschool strike for a while now (middle school, amiright?!?), I hit on the idea of reviewing cell transport while playing with her absolute most favorite thing in the world:

Gummy bears.

Friends, this project was a. Big. Hit. Hallefreakinlujah!

So here's the scenario for gummy bear osmosis: the lipid bilayer of a cell membrane is semipermeable, so small molecules, like water, can pass through, but large molecules, and the cell's organelles, cannot. In the process of making a gummy bear, collagen is heated and then cooled, which causes it to form strong chains that act similarly to that cell membrane.

Osmosis is the process that describes the way that water wants to make solutions on both sides of a semipermeable membrane equally diluted. It's an easy way to make one of the processes of cell transport visible to the naked eye, which is why osmosis is what we mostly play with.

To demonstrate and measure osmosis in gummy bears, you need lots of gummy bears, a way to weigh and measure them, clean containers, and some different solutions to test. The idea is that you weigh and measure a gummy bear, put it in an interesting solution for a while, then weigh and measure it again to determine how much water it took in via osmosis.

The fun part is that you get to play with whatever solutions you think would be a good idea.

And this kid had plenty of good ideas!

She admitted that she knew what would happen with this one...

...and she was correct. Blech!

She also tested tap water--

--canola oil--

--dish soap--

--and several others, including vinegar, salt water, and water with baking soda dissolved in it:

Yeah, those are dirty dishes in the background. No, we don't wash them. I could be snotty and tell you that we do cool stuff like science experiments instead, but actually we're just lazy and we'd rather read than clean. 

I did not require the kid to write her process as a formal lab procedure (we've done that before so that they know what it is, but this experiment is "just for fun," which is the lie that I told to get her to do science with me at all), but I did require her to write everything down, because, as I tell the kids all the time, writing everything down is what makes it into science!

However, if you want to have your kid write a formal lab procedure, or at least read one, here is a stellar write-up of a gummy bear osmosis experiment.

The kid weighed every single gummy bear by grams first, then weighed each one again after 2, 4, 6, 12, 24, and 48 hours. She also played with them, of course, because their textures get VERY interesting:

I won't tell you any of her results, because it's more fun if YOU do the project yourself, but here are some of the pretty photos that I took of her squishy gummy bear experimental subjects:

This one is my favorite. Its little face!

Yummy, right?

I won't go into it here, but the kid conducted this experiment as a prerequisite to an engineering challenge in which we dissolved the eggshells off of a couple of eggs, and then I challenged the kids to find a solution that served to remove the water FROM an egg via osmosis.

I'll show you the pics later, but it's harder than you think! Good thing that the kid took good notes about the results of her gummy bear osmosis experiment.

Or DID she?

If you're looking for a cell transport experiment with less of a time (and countertop space!) commitment, a few years ago we did this diffusion into gelatin experiment, and it was SUPER cool.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!